to every reason but the true one—abandonment of principle.
But that is a small matter, nationally speaking. The really serious upshot of the decision which was then taken and adhered to is that the country has been prevented from appreciating the frightful dangers which threaten it from the autocracy of the Government in foreign policy.
For the overwhelming military success of the war on the one hand, and the split between the Liberal Party chiefs on the other, have combined to stabilise the conditions under which our foreign policy was conducted from 1905 to 1914. There has resulted a conspiracy of circumstance to withhold the truth from the people in regard to the diplomacy of the pre-war period. Why trouble? Has not
the war been won? "Victory" is a great whitewash.
The hope lies with the new forces which are advancing to the conquest of political power from below.
My object in translating and annotating these pre-war Belgian diplomatic despatches has been that the leaders of Labour, but, above all, the young men in the Labour and Socialist movement who are acting as intellectual torch-bearers to their fellow-workers, may be helped by their perusal to realise the kind of system which, so long as it prevails, will block Labour's advance.
The same influences which were at work in our country in the ten years preceding the First World War are at work to-day preparing for the next one. Their power is undiminished. Their capacity for mischief is, if possible, greater. The people are as helpless to-day in their grip as they were before the war.
From that grip the people can only free themselves if they fully understand its nature.
Such books as Lord Fisher's "Memories," Colonel Repington's "The First World-War," Mr. Wilfred Scawen Blunt's "Diaries" are invaluable—but expensive.
In this volume, at a moderate price, the reader will be able to follow, step by step, the unfolding of the plots and counter-plots which finally culminated in the tragedy of August, 1914.
The writers of these despatches were the diplomatic representatives of a small Power. It was ostensibly to save the independence of that same small Power that we went to war. I know of no diplomatic documents on the
